It is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of the divine plan. Russia's cunning plan in Ukraine belongs to the same category. In analyzing the statements made by Sergei Lavrov in his interview with Russia Beyond the Headlines on September 17, 2014, some commentators have added a third concept - that of diplomatic theatre - to this duality. While it is generally bad form to overanalyze religious beliefs, let us apply some simple mathematics to understand the play behind the curtains of diplomatic theatre.

The concept of diplomatic theatre is understood differently by commentators. Many of the definitions are clearly wrong. Diplomatic theatre is not magic, mysticism, or sleight of hand. The language of diplomacy is far more akin to mathematics than commonly understood. As in mathematics, every word has its place, and no phrase is spoken out of context or frivolously.

The product of a diplomatic equation is directly dependent on the placement of definitions in a string of calculated statements. Like legal language, diplomatic language can be deciphered, broken down into components, and analyzed with precision. To a keen observer, there is nothing mysterious in what diplomats say. Bad diplomacy, on the other hand, is the opposite of this approach. And Lavrov is an excellent diplomat. Accordingly, let us parse out the meaning of Lavrov's interview without resorting to magic or belief in the guiding hand that can do no wrong.

Setting Out the Equation

Lavrov's interview contains a wealth of statements with respect to the crisis in Ukraine. Many of them have been made before - Russia's steadfast commitment to investigating the Odessa massacre, the crash of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing MH17, and the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by the Ukrainian troops in Donbass. All of these remarks are laudable, praiseworthy and notable in and of themselves.

However, the immediate, short and medium term future of Novorossiya no longer depends on what happened in Odessa, Mariupol and Slavyansk. Far more important to the existence of the Donetsk and the Lugansk People's Republics (respectively, "DRP" and "LPR") is the document executed following consultations in Minsk on September 5, 2014 - the Protocol of the Trilateral Contact Group, more commonly known as the Minsk Protocol. Perhaps even more important to the continued existence of the DPR and the LPR is Russia's commitment to the Minsk Protocol, which Russia signed along with the other participants, and the forms such commitment takes.

Is it morning in America again, or is the bubble that is the American economy about to pop (again), this time perhaps tipping it into full-blown collapse in five stages with symphonic accompaniment and fireworks?

A country blowing itself up is quite a sight to behold, and it makes us wonder about lots of things. For instance, it makes us wonder whether the people who are doing the blowing up happen to be criminals. (Sure, they may be in a manner of speaking - as a moral judgment passed on the powerful by the powerless - but since none of them are likely to see the inside of a jail cell or even a courtroom any time soon, the point is moot. Let's be sure to hunt them down once they try to run and hide, though.) But at a much more basic and fundamental level, a better question to ask is this one:

"Why are we being so fucking stupid?"

What do I mean when I use the term "fucking stupid"? I do not mean it as a term of abuse but as a precise, if unflattering, diagnosis. Here is as good a definition as any, excerpted from American Eulogy by Jim Quinn:

If you had told someone on September 10, 2001 that ten years later America would be running $1.5 trillion annual deficits, fighting two wars of choice in countries that despise our presence, and had not only not addressed the $100 [trillion] of unfunded welfare liabilities but added billions more with Medicare D and Obamacare, they would have thought you were a crazy doomster predicting the end of the world. They would have put you away in a padded cell if you had further predicted that politicians would cut taxes three separate times, that the Wall Street banks that leveraged themselves 40 to 1 and destroyed the financial system [would be] handed $2 trillion of taxpayer funds so they could pay themselves multi-million dollar bonuses, and that the Federal Reserve would triple its balance sheet to $2.45 trillion by running its printing presses at hyper-speed and handing the money to those same Wall Street Mega-Banks.

Where does Scotland's wealth go (if it doesn't stay here)?

It's a simple question but not one often asked, probably as most economics bloggers like myself get bogged down in numbers and over-complicate the issue.

Data from the UK Government's Office for National Statistics demonstrates in simple terms the distribution of personal wealth in the UK. It is clear to see that London and the south are by far the wealthiest parts of the UK. Not just the south east but the South West as well.
Clearly the further north you go the lower the distribution of wealthy households and this matches other research that shows overall lower average household wealth, and lower the average household income in the north.

The map of wealthy household distribution shows a clear north/south wealth divide within England itself, which many of us knew about, but many will be surprised at just how far south the divide sits. Without over complicating the issue this data when taken with all other wealth and income statistics that look at wealth/income distribution within the UK confirms that wealth is centralised around London. The more northern areas of the UK have suffered years of de-industrialisation, high unemployment and lower investment that followed the emergence of London-centric finance and service-led economic policy under consecutive Conservative and New Labour governments.

No surprises there then! However, when you compare the map of where the wealth ends up with a map of where the UK's wealth is generated, they don't tell the same story. The union drains wealth from Scotland.

© Murdo MacleodAlex Salmond concedes defeat last night at the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh.

Leader of the Scottish National party says he will stand down in November when a new leader of the party will be chosen

Alex Salmond has said he will stand down as Scotland's first minister and Scottish National party leader after failing to secure a majority for independence in Thursday's referendum.

He told a press conference in his official residence of Bute House that he would stand down as first minister in November when a new SNP leader will be chosen.

Salmond said: "For me right now there is a decision as to who is best placed to lead this process forward politically.

"I believe that in this new exciting situation, redolent with possibility, party, parliament and country would benefit from new leadership".

He said that he would not accept the SNP's nomination to be a candidate for leader at the party's annual conference in Perth in November, allowing a new party leader to be elected.

Given the SNP's majority in the Scottish parliament, the new leader will also become first minister.

The SNP deputy leader, Nicola Sturgeon, is widely seen as the most likely successor to the long-serving Salmond.

Salmond added that the most important thing to the independence cause was not about who was first minister of Scotland

Russia has said the conduct of the Scottish referendum "did not meet international standards", with its observers complaining the count took place in rooms that were too big and that the procedure was badly flawed.

In an apparent attempt to mirror persistent western criticism of Russia's own elections, Igor Borisov - an accredited observer - said the poll failed to meet basic international norms.

Borisov and three other Russians arrived in Edinburgh on Wednesday evening, the state news agency Ria Novosti reported. The team from Moscow's Public Institute of Suffrage watched voting take place in the Scottish capital and the surrounding area. It also met with Scottish politicians, voters and representatives from non-governmental organisations, Ria said.

Borisov said he was unimpressed by what he saw. He said the room where he watched the count on Thursday night was a cavernous "aircraft hangar" next to an airfield. It was difficult to see what was going on, he said, adding: "The hangar is approximately 100m by 300m. There are tables, with voting papers stacked upon them, but the observers are stuck around the perimeter. Even if you want to, it's impossible to tell what's happening. It's also unclear where the boxes with ballot papers come from."

As Scotland's independence vote draws near, concerns are growing over possible vote rigging in the absence of international observers, which may cause the vote to play into the hands of the British government.

Informed sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told Press TV that absence of international observers to monitor the independence referendum and close competition between pro- and anti-independence camps are the main reasons that have strengthened suspicion of vote-rigging attempts.

Meanwhile, various British political leaders have been launching what has been described by Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond as a "scaremongering" campaign, in an effort to make Scots wary of the possible fallout of a 'Yes' to independence.

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is deeply skeptical about the Obama administration's new strategy to confront the ISIL terrorist organization in Syria, according to a report.

CIA officials have expressed "outright opposition" to the White House's proposal to task the Pentagon to further train and arm the so-called moderate militant groups in Syria to push back ISIL terrorists, The Huffington Post reports.

The CIA has already been covertly training Syrian insurgents out of secret bases in Jordan to fight the government of President Bashar al-Assad.


The spy agency, however, has come to find the militants increasingly "disorganized" and "radicalized," the report said.

"The CIA thinks that it is impossible to train and equip a force of pro-Western Syrian nationals that can fight and defeat Assad, al-Nusra and ISIL, regardless of whatever air support that force may receive," a Democratic member of Congress told the online newspaper.

The congressman added that the CIA believes the new strategy is "doomed to failure."

He said that the CIA already believes its previous assignment to train and arm the Syrian militants was a "fool's errand." "And they are well aware of the fact that many of the arms that they provided ended up in the wrong hands."

The US claims Syrian President Bashar Assad has broken the chemical weapons treaty he agreed to earlier this year, by launching chlorine gas attacks in Syrian villages. It comes as the Senate officially approved a plan to arm and train Syrian rebels.

US Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday accused Assad of breaching the terms of the global pact on chemical weapons, by unleashing chlorine gas via barrel bomb attacks earlier this year.


"We believe there is evidence of [President Bashar] Assad's use of chlorine, which when you use it - despite it not being on the list - it is prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention," Kerry told the US House of Representatives. "He's in violation of the convention."

Kerry went on to add that Washington is studying ways to hold Assad to account.


The US official was not alone in what appeared to be a new wave of Western pressure on Assad's government, which was previously accused of perpetrating deadly chemical attacks in March 2013 near Aleppo and in August 2013 in Ghouta.

Less than one month after killing more than 2,100 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 500 children, Israel is hosting its annual drone conference.

Organized in partnership with the US embassy in Tel Aviv, "Israel Unmanned Systems 2014" offers Israeli military firms an opportunity to flaunt the performance of their products, many of which were tested on Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip this summer.
Palestine has long served as a laboratory for Israel's ballooning "homeland security" industry to test and perfect weapons of domination and control, with disenfranchised and stateless Palestinians serving as their lab rats.

Speaking to the German magazine Der Spiegel last month, Avner Benzaken, head of the Israeli army's "technology and logistics" division - a unit "comprised largely of academics who also happen to be officers" - explained the benefits of this occupation.

"If I develop a product and want to test it in the field, I only have to go five or ten kilometers from my base and I can look and see what is happening with the equipment," said Benzaken. "I get feedback, so it makes the development process faster and much more efficient."

Easy access to a captive population to experiment on allows Israeli weapons manufacturers to market their products as "combat-proven," a coveted label that gives Israel a competitive edge in the international arms trade. Israel's suppression technology is then exported to regimes that are similarly invested in subjugating the poor and marginalized.

This dystopian arrangement has paved the way for Israel, a country the size of New Jersey, to rank among the globe's top five largest arms exporters and to become the world's number one exporter of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones.

US imperialism was once a fearsome force - mainly for ill. Under the latter heading, Washington's savage destruction of Vietnam four decades ago comes readily to mind. But now the American Imperium has become just a gong show on the Potomac - even as its weapons have gotten more lethal and its purposes more spurious and convoluted.

There is no more conspicuous proof than Obama's quixotic "war" on ISIS. The quote marks are necessary, of course, because the White House insists that this is merely a counter-terrorism project that is not really a war; that the campaign to "degrade, disrupt and destroy" the Islamic State will not deploy a single American soldier - at least not one with his or her boots on; and that the heavy lifting on the ground against the barbaric ISIS hordes will be conducted by a "broad coalition" of so far nameless nations.

In truth, the whole thing is a giant, pathetic farce. There will be no coalition, no strategy, no boots, no ISIS degradation, no gain in genuine safety and security for the American homeland. This is an utterly misbegotten war against an enemy that has more urgent targets than America, but a war which will nonetheless fire-up the already boiling cauldron of Middle Eastern tribal, religious and political conflict like never before. There is no name for what Obama is attempting except utter folly.

Even before Secretary Kerry brought his medicine show to Paris, it was evident there is no coalition of the willing - or even the bought. The best that the 26 odd signatories to his communique could muster was a vague endorsement of Iraq's boundaries and a pledge to support its still only partially formed, three-week old government "by any means necessary".........except not by a single one of the "means" that are actually available.

Let's start with the neighboring nations which should fear ISIS far more urgently than the citizens in distant places like Lincoln NE and Spokane WA. The short answer is not a single one of them want to help, can help or will be invited to help. Obama's putative coalition consists of the invisible (Germany), the indisposed (Turkey), the indecisive (the UK), the ineligible (Iran), the unwelcome (Saudi Arabia), the insolvent (Egypt) and the incensed (Russia), among others.

Thus, the heartland of the newly emerged Islamic State is in the upper Euphrates valley of Syria centered at Raqqah. That is, the fearsome threat against which Washington wants to mobilize two dozen nations sits cheek-by-jowl along a 560 mile border with Turkey. And the latter possesses the largest and most potent air force and army in the region - a force of some 600,000 including reserves or 25X the size of the CIA's most recent, and undoubtedly exaggerated, count of ISIS fighters.

Moreover, against the several score of tanks and armored vehicles that the jihadists seized from the retreating Iraqi Army, the Turkish military possesses 3,500 tanks, 9,000 armored fighting vehicles, 700 multiple-launch rocket systems, 2,000 towed artillery pieces and 1,000 aircraft and helicopters - much of this right out of the latest US military specs. Finally, by virtue of its membership in NATO, it also happens to host one of the largest US air bases in the world.